Yes, and what the GDPR crowd is telling me is that I should just trust the EU to always act fairly and never engage in any kind of politically motivated subterfuge.
And not only that, my concerns and dissent regarding GDPR piss people off so much, that at this point, every comment I post just gets downvoted immediately. Now I realize it’s against HN guidelines to discuss this, but when I post a comment and the delay it takes for me to return from the post page is enough for my comment to already have a downvote, I feel discouraged. It’s very clear the person who did that had no good faith intent on a discussion nor intent to even minimally read my comment. And I’m supposed to try to argue my points in good faith despite this.
The pro-GDPR crowd may be winning the mindshare but they are inheriting the cancer of something not allowed to be criticized. And if we ever do see an egregious fee driven by political motivations, am I supposed to feel smug for having predicted the possibility or sad that my mere expression that the default maximum fines are so ridiculous that they basically terrorize anyone who is not a multinational corporation turned out to be well-founded?
All I ever asked for was for people to recognize the chilling effects that this regulation can have. The internet used to have so many small websites, forums and wikis, and many of these fall under the umbrella of GDPR. And this is basically the treatment I get for trying to represent this dying breed of website: as some corporate shill worth being buried and not considered.
It’s not like I care that much about being with the mob, but it pains me that as the open internet gradually dies, people flat out just don’t care. GDPR as it is today is just represents a huge amount of risk for anyone that is not a multinational corporation, and it only gets scarier the further down you are. I’m sorry but just telling people to not worry about how the law is written will not work. Some people will ignore it, some people will try to follow it, and some people will just stop trying altogether deciding the risk simply isn’t worth it. And that latter part is most likely to occur for websites that are more objectionable, since they will likely face harsher treatment just due to cognitive biases alone, since we’re talking about considerations that humans make rather than the word of law.